* Atari's custom "TIA" (Television Interface Adapter) chip, which produced
graphics and sound. Of particular interest is that this chip was designed
by none other than Jay Miner, who went on to design the Amiga.

These were all socketed chips. The retro-consoles have two surface mount
chips covered in "don't touch me" glue. I'm guessing that one is the entire
2600 chipset, and the other is a ROM containing the game library.

Atari 2600 programming is fascinating to read about -- but it must have been
super frustrating. The TIA has no frame buffer, just a couple of registers
holding various objects that
could be drawn on the screen. Programmers had to do all sorts of manual work
to make changes happen on every frame during different portions of the scan.

Strange, but some retro folks are still making new games and carts for the 2600.

A friend of mine is active in the Vectrex scene, he repairs those things, built some hardware, wrote some games and they do have annual fairs for all things retro here in Europe. I guess the fascinating thing about those devices is, that you really have a chance of almost completely understanding every single circuit.

I knew a guy that had one of the hook it up to the tv and the speaker output things to make "dazzling" images in the screen in time to the music. Yea, it pretty much was used for what Mr-Atari says it was used for from what I could tell.